One of Broadway’s greatest songwriters, Jule Styne was a prolific composer for film and stage. In just over 30 years he penned more than 1,500 tunes, including the outstanding scores for Gypsy and Funny Girl, as well as pop standards like “Time After Time,” “I’ve Heard That Song Before,” and “It’s Magic.” And yet the flamboyant and irascible Styne remains, according to English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, “the most persistently underrated of all popular composers.”
Born Julius Kerwin Stein in December 1905, in London’s working-class area of Bethnal Green, to Ukrainian-Jewish parents, Stein proved to be a musical prodigy, dueting with music hall star Harry Lauder at the tender age of three. Stein emigrated to Chicago with his family in 1913, and by age eight he was performing Haydn and Mozart with the Chicago and Detroit symphony orchestras. Stubby fingers forced him to shorten his concert career and, switching from classics to pop, he wrote his first hit, “Sunday,” in 1926. In 1931, he started his own dance band, changing his name to “Styne” to avoid confusion with Jules Stein, the founder of the Music Corporation of America.
After a brief spell in New York, where he split his time between songwriting and teaching singing, he moved to Hollywood in the mid-1930s to work as a vocal coach for Shirley Temple. In 1935 he joined Republic Studios as a staff songwriter, where he was teamed up with lyricist Frank LOESSER. By 1940 he was churning out cowboy tunes for Gene Autry and Roy Rogers at Republic. He later recalled that he “did just about anything they asked me to do … orches-trations, conducting, playing the piano for [Rogers’ horse] Trigger….”
During World War II, when Loesser went into the army, Styne was paired with lyricist Sammy Cahn. The pair worked on minor film musicals that produced major jukebox hits, such as “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” “The Things We Did Last Summer,” and the Academy Award-nominated “I’ll Walk Alone.” In 1944, they wrote the score for the Frank SINATRA movie Step Lively, and began a long, hitfilled relationship with the singer that included “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week),” “Give Me Five Minutes More,” and “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry.” Sinatra also sang Styne’s title song to the 1954 movie Three Coins in the Fountain, which earned Styne his sole Oscar.
In 1947, Styne, a compulsive gambler, hit the jackpot with his first Broadway musical High Button Shoes (featuring “Papa, Won’t You Dance With Me?”). For the next two decades, Styne had a nearly unbroken string of smash shows, teaming up with lyricists such as Leo Robin, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Stephen SONDHEIM. Among these triumphs were 1949’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”), 1956’s The Bells Are Ringing (“Just in Time”), and 1959’s Gypsy (“Everything’s Coming Up Roses”). Comden, one of his collaborators, said of his quixotic, shorthand speech and working methods: “In the first five minutes Jule Styne will have a thousand ideas, 995 of which will be somewhere between surrealistic and Martian, and five of which will be pure gold.”
In Funny Girl (1964), Styne’s most successful musical, he showed off the full range of its young star, Barbra STREISAND, with her signature song “People.” The show also produced the hit “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” Following a string of ambitious failures, Styne returned to top form with 1972’s Sugar (based on the classic film comedy Some Like Lt Hot) and Lorelei, a 1974 sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
When Jule Styne died on September 20, 1994, in Manhattan, at the age of 88, he left a rich musical legacy typified by what music historian Dwight Blocker Bowers called “the neon-lit brashness and sentimentality that are vital elements of American show business.”
Michael R. Ross
SEE ALSO:
FILM MUSIC; FILM MUSICALS; MUSICALS.
FURTHER READING
Taylor, Theodore. Jule: The Story of
Composer Jule Styne
(New York: Random House, 1979).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
American Songbook Series: Jule Styne.